Places you sleep: vineyard hotels, agriturismi, castles and private villas.
The best hotels in Lecce are not on the coast or in the countryside: they are inside the old town, in palazzi of honey-colored stone a few lanes from Santa Croce. That makes Lecce the easiest base in Salento for a wine trip. The Negroamaro cellars of Salice Salentino, Guagnano and Copertino are all within … Read more
Where to stay in Salento depends on which wine you came for. Negroamaro, the dark, bitter-cherry grape of the heel, grows around Salice Salentino and Guagnano, northwest of Lecce. Primitivo belongs to Manduria, on the Taranto side. Between them run the Ionian coast and the old towns of Nardò and Gallipoli. The six stays below … Read more
Wine masserie in Puglia are the region’s answer to the Tuscan wine estate: fortified farmhouses built to guard grain and olive oil, now sleeping guests among their own vines. Plenty of masserie call themselves wine resorts and pour someone else’s bottles. The six below make their own wine, mostly Primitivo, from vineyards you can walk … Read more
The best wine resorts in Sicily are spread across an island roughly the size of Vermont, and that is the first thing to plan around. A night on Etna, a baglio above the Marsala salt coast and a lighthouse among Malvasia vines on Salina are three different trips, each a long drive or a ferry … Read more
Where to stay in Taormina is a question most Etna wine trips eventually ask, because the town on the cliff above the Ionian Sea has the grandest hotels in eastern Sicily and the volcano fills the view from half their terraces. The cellars of the north slope are about an hour away by road. These … Read more
Where to stay on the Etna east and south slopes depends on what you want to see from the window: vineyards, the volcano or the Ionian Sea. This side of the mountain is closer to Catania and the coast than the north, and its towns, from Milo and Zafferana Etnea to Trecastagni and Viagrande, sit … Read more
Where to stay on the Etna north slope is a simpler question than it looks, because almost everything happens in three towns strung along the same road. Castiglione di Sicilia, Linguaglossa and Randazzo sit above the Alcantara valley, with the contrade of Etna’s most talked-about wines between them. These six addresses cover the range, from … Read more
Etna wine resorts are a small and fairly young category on a very old volcano. A handful of estates on the north and east slopes have turned palmenti, farmhouses and aristocratic villas into rooms, and most of them still make wine from the vines outside the window. These six are the ones we would book, … Read more
Rioja Alavesa hotels sit in a string of hilltop villages rather than in one city, and the choice you make decides how much of the region you can see on foot. Laguardia is walled, closed to most traffic inside and small enough to cross in ten minutes. Elciego, Villabuena de Alava and Samaniego are a … Read more
Where to stay in Haro is a short list, and that is rather the point. Rioja’s wine capital keeps six century-old cellars inside one railway district and only a handful of hotels in the streets above it, so the town rewards walking far more than driving. These six rooms cover the range, from a five-star … Read more